New Session Manager

For community centers we need to present to the user the amount of time that their session has left and at the same time log the user off when the session timer runs out. As a nice touch we want to warn the user as the session nears it’s end.

To achieve this we use an app indicator with a menu item with the amount of time left.

For the warnings we use the libnotify and change the icon of the app indicator too:

We also want to notify the user of how much time they have, so we add a welcome:

If the program exits or is killed, the gnome pid is also killed so the user logs off.

All of this is configurable so we can say what users should have what kind of session and what warnings:

This tends to be a recurring question in various circles: “I manage a community center’s computer systems, how can I have guest sessions time out automatically”, and now we have a functional and aesthetic way of doing this, that doesn’t depend on timeoutd which doesn’t appear to be maintained anymore.

Martin, one feature that would be nice to have is to timeout idle session, like timeoutd currently does. That would also be useful in lab situation (or shared computers) where users do not have a hard limit set for their session, but where we would like to shut off the sessions of users who would not have logged off properly before leaving. That’s actually a very common use-case. Just a suggestion.